[TUHS] Happy birthday, Niklaus Wirth!

[Toby Thain]

On 2018-02-15 8:06 PM, Clem cole wrote:
> The whole reason VM was developed at UCB was because Ernie (the
> original) Vax was funded to develop the ability to port MacLisp and more
> importantly Macsyma from ITS.  
> V32’s static address space was not going to work. 
> 
> 
> Btw the program we used to debug the VM system on the original mc500 was
> macsyma’s competition, sms (which would later become wolfram).
> 

You probably meant "SMP", built by Wolfram and others at Caltech:
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/smp-symbolic-manipulation-program/

It sounds like Mathematica probably did not _directly_ derive from SMP
due to a court ruling.

  "A dispute with the administration over the intellectual property
rights regarding SMP—patents, copyright, and faculty involvement in
commercial ventures—eventually caused him to resign from Caltech.
SMP was further developed and marketed commercially by Inference Corp.
of Los Angeles during 1983–1988."

Curiously, the above text has been copied and pasted verbatim all
over the web and it's not clear where it originated. "SMP was
essentially Version Zero of the more ambitious Mathematica system" is
also all over the web including Wikipedia.



> In both cases the idea was to ensure the memory system was being exercised. 

Nowadays we'd just run gcc :)

--Toby


> 
> Clem
> 
> 
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not
> quite. 
> ...